Re: looks – it looks pretty fantastic actually. Out of the box, it looks like the it won’t stay in vegas blogger party site (http://itwontstayinvegas.com/). And, as far as CSS goes, the only modifications I’ve made to this site that require CSS is to change the header image and the background color.

Everything else – font size, font, number of columns, tabs, is all done with menus and and buttons in the Thesis control panel. There’s also a really good level of basic instruction in doing things like changing the background here: http://diythemes.com/thesis/rtfm/custom-backgrounds/

Re: Columns – in a word, no. You can use the multimedia box to span two columns at the top of the list (and you can style that to look any way you want), but underneath you’d have to do some serious code modification to split the columns the way you’re talking about doing it…

Hope that helps,

Cheers,
– J

I’ve been researching thesis for a while now and I’m almost ready to buy. I’m wondering if you could answer a couple questions and in return I promise to use one of your links to purchase it.

1) How good does it look out of the box? I’d like to upgrade my site presentation right away, and while I have a technical background, I am NOT a CSS guy. So while I could buy a book and teach myself, and probably will, I’d rather not wait.

2) If I go with a three column presentation, can I mix and match widgets that span columns and those that don’t. For instance, could I have a 2 column wide RSS signup box, then underneath it two 1 column widgets listing categories and recent posts let’s say, then under that another 2 column wide box with an RSS feed? And so on…

Thanks in advance for your response…